You say this as if a foregone conclusion, a statement of fact.
There's zero wrong with considering what it means to be a man. Just because I don't address what it means to be a woman doesn't make me sexist. It's not toxic to consider who you are and what values you hold dear.
Perhaps the wince that's induced in you is projection on your part? It doesn't make me wince. Nor do I apologize for it. I don't look at this poem as sexist. It addresses who I want to be as a man, no more, no less. It has no bearing on my thoughts of women. I'm not a woman, therefore my thoughts and feelings about what women should be are largely irrelevant... at least as irrelevant as to Rudyard Kipling who didn't address this topic at all in the poem.
This is personal for me because it is the most profound thing I've ever read. For someone to come and refer to it as sexist is demeaning.
Savor it and quit being so wound up is all I'm saying. There's a place for everything and this was ill-placed.
There is a gulf between "misogynistic" and "being part of a culture that largely ignores women". It strains credulity to claim that the words "son" and "man" don't draw males closer and push females away. Any one poem is a "micro", but it adds up across the culture.
As with all though, you either evolve or you're doomed to irrelevance. This should be a familiar concept to any programmer in the past 20 years :P
Exactly this. It can be tough but you pick up your load and move valiantly forward.
If you can't make a trivial fix to a simple problem, you aren't paying attention to the poem's message.
It would be like, in the pursuit of lowering your sodium intake, making bread without salt. Is it healthier? Maybe. What does it taste like now? Cardboard.
But...it doesn't. While the fictious direct addressee is the “son” (whether literal or in the figurative sense of an protege of an elder mentor is neither explicit nor important, since the whole impact of the poem is in its general applicability not in it being specific to an addressee) of the speaker from whose POV the poem is told, the son/man pairing necessarily states that the qualities are tied to adulthood/maturity, but is just as valid if they are not inherently tied to gender as if they are.
Having grown up as the child of a single mother, I don't think many men ever stop to think where we'd be without them. It's not a place I'd care to exist.
Most men are only as successful as they are because they had a loyal and dependable partner at their side to help propel them there - if by nothing more than taking care of all the shit they have no time for while they're so busy chasing their success. I wonder how many men would be half as successful without their partners supporting them and encouraging them forward.